Dean Acheson

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

— Dean Acheson

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

— Dean Acheson

I am willing to join in your statement on the ground that I feel about the future of the United States whenever the President starts out on his travels the way the Marshal of the Supreme Court does when he opens a session of that Court. You will recall that he ends up his liturgy by saying "God save the United States for the Court is now sitting.

— Dean Acheson

Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.

— Dean Acheson

How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.

— Dean Acheson

The experiences of the years...have brought the country, particularly its young people, to a mood of depression, disillusion, and withdrawal from the effort to affect the world.

— Dean Acheson

In response, Acheson wrote to "tell a tale of large conceptions, great achievements...Its hero is the American people."

— Dean Acheson

Plainly plenty of work was waiting to be done. The question was: would the State Department do it? I proposed to have a shot at finding out.

— Dean Acheson

General Marshall was "impatient with a type of nonsense particularly prevalent in the State Department known as 'kicking the problem around.' All of us who have work with General Marshall have reported a recurring outburst of his: 'Don't fight the problem, gentlemen, solve it!' With him the time to be devoted to analysis of a problem, to balancing 'on the one hand' against 'on the other hand,' was definitely limited. The discussion he wanted was about plans of action"

— Dean Acheson

I must plead guilty as any of escaping into immediate busywork to keep from the far harder task of peering into a dim future, which, of course, should be one of a diplomat's main duties.

— Dean Acheson

My memory...is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.

— Dean Acheson

Among the roles the Budget Bureau (now OMB) was that of constant critic and improver of administration in the federal executive branch. In my day this work had fallen to the products of graduate schools in civil administration. Their ideas...seemed to me theoretical nonsense.

— Dean Acheson

The heads of these divisions, like barons in a feudal system weakened at the top by mutual suspicion and jealousy between king and prince, were constantly at odds if not at war...For the most part the barons were knowledgeable people performing in a way the times had completely outdated, a fact of which they were quite unaware.

— Dean Acheson

I soon discovered that the greater part of a day in Old State was devoted to meetings. Where the boundaries of jurisdiction were fuzzy or overlapping, meetings became inevitable. Most questions affected a number of functional and geographic divisions...These meetings gave the illusion of action, but often frustrated it by attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. What was most often needed was not compromise but decision.

— Dean Acheson

When Acheson was first joined State as Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, he writes the following in a section entitled "My Search for a Function"..."My official duties were summed up in the Department of State Bulletin by misleading platitudes...Both (Secretary) Hull and the President...knew me and, surely, had not asked me into the Department to perform the largely nonexistent duties defined in the Bulletin."

— Dean Acheson

Not all the arts of diplomacy are learned solely in its practice. There are other exercise yards."

— Dean Acheson

In the State Department, one never lacks for helpful suggestions.

— Dean Acheson

Unfortunately, the hyperbole of the inaugural outran the provisions of the budget.

— Dean Acheson

President Truman used to say that budget figures revealed far more of proposed policy than speeches.

— Dean Acheson

147, on the situation in Greece: "imminent collapse due to mounting guerrilla activity, supplied and directed from outside, economic chaos, and the Greek governmental inability to meet the crisis."

— Dean Acheson

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

— Dean Acheson

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

— Dean Acheson